The Best And Worst Of Us

Films often explore ethics and morals.

Quite recently, I watched a film that seems to have examined one extreme of what it is to be human.

Looking at the very worst of what we can imagine to be the consequences of our progression as a race. Not wanting to accept the limitations placed upon us by the lives we lead.

The Island is quite a recent film, and supposes that in the near future, techniques of cloning have been developed that enable those with sufficient resources, money, to purchase duplicates of themselves, that can be used for the transplantation of organs, should an accident occur, or disease threaten the life of the ‘sponsor’.

This kind of medical development is not as far-fetched as we might think.

What is interesting about the film is the way in which the cloned ‘property’ is kept unaware of its purpose and fate, as a means of ensuring that the organs contained within the clone have the kind of resilience that millions of years of human evolution have given ‘ordinary’ people.

The ethical issues involved in keeping to protect people alive simply for the purpose of use as spam parts is well presented.

The clones are kept in an isolated location, where the live their lives as innocent childlike beings, convinced that they are the survivors of a contamination that has destroyed the great majority of the human race.

A lottery is used to determine which of the clones might be transported to the mythical island as the film’s title, which is reckoned to be the place from which the Earth will be repopulated by those that have ‘survived’ the calamitous contamination.

But what the businessmen that have created this financially rewarding experiment I have not taken into account is the notion that the clones might develop something of the personalities of the people that they have replicated.

And one particular person, played by our hero, discovers a flying bug, a butterfly, he begins to question what he has been taught to believe without question.

His curiosity leads to him discovering the fate of lottery winners, as they are euthanised after their organs are harvested.

And when someone that he has against the rules become a little too friendly with is chosen for “relocation” to the island, he makes a desperate bid for freedom, and the two of them escape into the outside world, that they expect to be severely contaminated, but isn’t.

With the threat this poses to the business of providing clones that genetically match their ‘owners’, a hunting party is in hot pursuit of these naive escapees.

They head for a modern futuristic Los Angeles, expecting that confronting their sponsors will result in them achieving some kind of safety.

But of course it is not as simple as that.

Our hero interestingly has started to develop the kind of memories that his wealthy sponsor has developed, which means that he inexplicably is able to drive at speed, knows how to operate this kind of high-speed machinery.

It becomes a fight for survival, when his sponsor reports his arrival to the pursuing hunters.

But in an unexpected twist, it is the sponsor that is gunned down, mistaken for the clone, and suddenly the tables are turned on this morally doubtful business.

Since his clone has been destroyed by the pursuing hunters, he is taken back to the facility where the clones are kept isolated from the world, and just as the disreputable business is about to eliminate several generations of product, manages to free the entire population of clones.

The film ends with several hundred naive clones, escaping from the isolated plant where they have been kept and misled their entire brief lives.

It is impossible not to draw parallels with other failed attempts at eugenics, and whilst there is no complete resolution of what happens next, this is not necessary.

It is enough that the failed contravention of everything that is good about humanity has been ended.

Interestingly, the day after having watched this film, I watched a much older film, Accidental Hero, in which a very different perspective on what it is to be ethically and morally human is presented.

In this film, Dustin Hoffman is a small time crook, who by accident of fate saves 54 people from certain death when their aeroplane crashes on its way across America from the west coast.

Dustin Hoffman is an unlikely hero, and he flees the scene of his heroism.

Because one of the people that he has saved is a television journalist, the action takes on a search for the hero of the day.

Through an accidental misplacing of one of his shoes, when the television company offers a reward of $1 million for the identification of the hero, an indigent friend to whom he has given the one shoe that he retained claims the reward.

What follows is a humorous at times series of events, but the end is somehow resolved, when he is able to agree with the mistaken hero that he can blackmail him, ensuring the future education of his young son.

The film finishes with a tantalising moment when the accidental hero is explaining to his young son what really happened, whilst they are both at the zoo.

The film finishes just at the point where a mother has screamed that her daughter has fallen into the Lions enclosure, and father says to son, “watch my shoes”.

Seen together, the two films represent the extraordinary spectrum of possibilities, for human action to be ethical and appropriate, what we might hope of ourselves or others, and what we would wish to be not even conceived as possible.